Lucid Imagination raises $6 Million series A funding

San Mateo: Lucid Imagination has received $6 million in Series-A funding from Granite Ventures and Walden International with equal contributions from each company. Lucid Imagination, is the first commercial open source company dedicated to the widely installed Apache Lucene / Solr search technology. The funding will be used to expand the technical staff integral to delivering the company's services, as well as grow sales and marketing functions.

"The Apache Lucene project has been a magnet for thousands of open source search developers and is ranked one of the top 15 open source projects," said Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination. "The strength of the Lucene community demonstrates that open source search technology is a viable, cost effective alternative to expensive proprietary technology. When search application developers think of Lucene and related projects, we want them to view Lucid Imagination as their destination for expertise and resources to make their enterprise search solutions successful."

"Over the past few years enterprise search has become a mission critical application, growing 28 percent annually, to $1.8 billion in 2007," said Christopher McKay, principal at Granite Ventures. "At the same time open source software adoption has seen tremendous growth as more companies look to reduce costs while still maintaining strong IT innovation. We believe that the Lucid Imagination team is uniquely qualified to bring the best of both to enterprises that are reluctant to deploy Apache Lucene/Solr technology without the support of a well-funded commercial company."